Recipes and food adventures with Adam Roberts
Category
essays
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I Declare War on Frisée!
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No one looks at a coil of barbed wire and thinks, “I would like to eat that.” Yet there are eaters among us who see a plate of frisée and think that very thought. Psychologists have a word for these people: masochists. How else to explain the inexplicable desire to consume razor-like stalks of pale…
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10 Ways To Fix A Mistake in the Kitchen
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[Image via RoboPencil] Everyone makes mistakes in the kitchen. Kim Kardashian got engaged in the kitchen and Justin Bieber fathered a baby in the kitchen. Look: it happens. Some people freak out when a mistake happens: “Oh my God! This is a disaster! I’ll never cook again!” Other people employ a series of tactics to…
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Does Food Writing Matter?
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[Photo credit, Dallas Observer] By this point it’s old news that Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has stepped down from his job after only two years. It’s a pretty short run for a restaurant critic, and his reasons for stepping down have been explained matter-of-factly: he’s going to become the Times’s…
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Let’s Talk About Lettuce
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I started cooking seven or eight years ago, maybe even a little further back, and it was around the time that people stopped buying whole heads of lettuce and started buying lettuce, pre-washed, in those little plastic tubs. The tubs, which are now omnipresent, have labels like “Spring Salad Mix” and “Herb Salad Mix” and…
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In Praise of the Two Fat Ladies
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Mr. Game Show was a Hanukkah gift that my parents bought me one year in the 1980s. It looked like a regular board game (small tokens that you moved around a large, printed board) except there, in the middle, was a plastic figurine that talked. “Hello!” it announced in a Guy Smiley voice, “I’m Mr.…
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Three Great Pieces of Food Writing
“By the time the intercom buzzes, I am assembling the greatest grilled cheese sandwiches of all time and the fridge is filled with seriously good Champagne, so packed that the bottles that can’t stand up on the top shelf lie on their sides like stockpiled ammo down below. This is not the day I want…
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What Makes A Great Steakhouse
1. It must be dark, like you’re underground. The consumption of red meat is such a primal, bodily act that darkness–like darkness in the bedroom–opens one up to experience pleasure with reckless abandon. 2. There must be a piano player with a bad toupee singing Neil Diamond songs or a cheesy duo of guitar player…
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Food Tastes Better When It Has a Good Story
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We ask many things of our food. We ask that our food is clearly identifiable (anything strange and murky immediately turns us off); we ask that our food is reasonably healthy–even if that means laying a redemptive tomato on a greasy, heart-crushing 5-pound burger. We ask that our food is prepared in a clean kitchen,…
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The Night I Let Friends Cook For Me
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Psychologically speaking, I’m a Jewish mother. I smother those I love with attention, worry, enthusiasm, judgment and, most of all, food. The food bit is a relatively recent development–I wasn’t smothering my high school friends with food–but now that I do cook and cook quite regularly, I have an almost compulsive need to feed others.…
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Food Negation Theory
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I have a theory. If you make spaghetti cacio e peppe for dinner, inspired by “Lidia’s Italy” on PBS–a dish of what is, essentially, spaghetti, pecorino cheese and pepper–you can undo whatever nutritional damage this does to your physique and/or health by eating a tub of green beans at the same time, as illustrated by…
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